The Facebook Paradox

To these reasons I would add “semantic corruption and debasement”, specifically as regards Facebook’s use of the word friend. Facebook’s co-opting of the word prompts some observations: Facebook has turned a relationship-oriented noun into a transactional verb. This transformation threatens to undermine the power of the word itself.

A similar transformation is being endured by the word parent; specifically, the relationship –oriented noun parent is being co-opted by the self-help industry and turned into a verb; worse still, a gerund—“parenting”.

This reassignment is objectionable in its own right; it’s made worse by the effect it is having on families. Why has the nuclear family of nuclear family relationship roles been torn asunder? And are our actual nuclear families being torn asunder because of it? Why are wife, husband, child, brother, and sister still nouns, while parent has had to undergo such an excruciating shift?

If women don’t wife their husbands and boys don’t brother their siblings, why do adults get to parent their children? Is this yet another example of the prerogatives of age? And what are we to make of the notion of parenting? What’s the purpose behind being a parent? The Facebook paradox prompts us to reflect: we’re “friends” on Facebook, but are we really friends?; we’re “parenting” our children, but are we really being parents?

Professor Alison Gopnik argues that we aren’t and that our cultural construct of “parenting” is actually keeping parents from being, well, parents. In her book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children (Don’t you just love these breathless, compound academic titles? They’re just like Lifetime network movie titles!), Gopnik makes the case that “parenting” has become an action-orientation rather than the relationship role it is designed, evolutionarily, to be.

It has become prescriptive, a list of things parents “should” do to ensure their child’s success. I won’t summarize it here; you’ve already read it before in lots of parenting books. The gist is that Gopnik thinks we shouldn’t approach parenting as a carpenter approaches a project. Carpenters very specifically follow a blueprint to achieve a very specific result. Parents who approach their roles like carpenters do may well end up with a conventionally successful grown-up child, but at potentially great cost—the robbing of independent exploration that Gopnik argues is so vital for a developing human during childhood and adolescence. Independent exploration and autonomy equip a child to be a more complete, resilient and well-adjusted adult.

She advocates parenting along the “gardener” model, a model which, as the name suggests, emphasizes a less-detailed, more fundamental kind of nurturing that allows the child (or plant) to better withstand the vagaries of life.